QUOTE : This happens because data scientists all too often lose sight of the folks on the receiving end of the transaction. They certainly understand that a data-crunching program is bound to misinterpret people a certain percentage of “he time, putting them in the wrong groups and denying them a job or a chance at their dream house. But as a rule, the people running the WMDs don’t dwell on those errors. Their feedback is money, which is also their incentive. Their systems are engineered to gobble up more data and fine-tune their analytics so that more money will pour in. Investors, of course, feast on these returns and shower WMD companies with more money. And the victims? Well, an internal data scientist might say, no statistical system can be perfect. Those folks are collateral damage. And often, like Sarah Wysocki, they are deemed unworthy and expendable. Big Data has plenty of evangelists, but I’m not one of them. This book will focus sharply in the other direction, on the damage inflicted by WMDs and the injustice they perpetuate. We will explore harmful examples that affect people at critical life moments: going to college, borrowing money, getting sentenced to prison, or finding and holding a job. All of these life domains are increasingly controlled by secret models wielding arbitrary punishments.